Rumble Strips|You have been warned!

No doubt we have too many laws in America and we are putting too many people in jail who are not threats to public safety. However, without including at least a footnote regarding the per capita executions I don’t see how the US per capita incarceration numbers are a valid comparison to those of your typical Dictatorship.

The report said the United States incarcerates more people than any other nation, far ahead of more populous China with 1.5 million people behind bars. It said the U.S. also is the leader in inmates per capita (750 per 100,000 people), ahead of Russia (628 per 100,000) and other former Soviet bloc nations which round out the Top 10. (Link)

Let’s not forget that Russia, China and other nations run by despots are known to round up people in the middle of the night who are not to be heard from again.

Everyone has to pay the piper. Instead of a ride home Art Madrid and Trisha Turner should have been treated to ride to the police station.

[La Mesa Mayor Art] Madrid was lying on the sidewalk near the passenger side of his Ford Explorer. [City finance department employee Trisha ] Turner was in the driver’s seat, her feet pointed out the open door. Vomit was observed around the SUV. (Link)

Most people don’t lose their jobs over a drunken indiscretion but almost no one gets a ride home either. It’s not that I’m in favor of incarcerating people over minor alcohol offenses (though who knows what these two were doing prior to pulling over and passing out in their puke,) but I am in favor of government officials being treated like everyone else.

If government officials want to drink without fear of being robbed and thrown in jail they have to let the regular citizenry enjoy the same privilege. On the flip, what’s good for me is good for thee.

Cult of the Dead Cow has released Goolag, an automated “Google Hacking” or data mining tool.

[T]hanks to a program that automates what has typically been painstaking manual labor. The program’s authors say they hope it will “screw a large Internet search engine and make the Web a safer place.”

Google hacking doesn’t mean anyone’s hacking Google’s Web site. Rather, it refers to a sophisticated searching technique used to uncover flaws in the way Web sites handle confidential details, such as public files containing password and credit card numbers and clues about the vulnerability of the site’s own servers.

The Cult of the Dead Cow is probably one guy, or gal I suppose. Maybe a Vegan making fun of meat eaters with the name.

Up until now I thought wind energy was spotty at best with too many drawbacks to be a significant player in the broad energy market. Evidently I have been laboring under some misconceptions because apparently many are already dependent on wind energy:

Electric Reliability Council of Texas (ERCOT) said a decline in wind energy production in west Texas occurred at the same time evening electric demand was building as colder temperatures moved into the state.

The grid operator went directly to the second stage of an emergency plan at 6:41 PM CST (0041 GMT), ERCOT said in a statement. (Link)

That seems significant to me.

In a blatant package check Hillary considers this Change of which Obama speaks.

Deposed in a hair-splitting 142 to 139 vote. Sexy Photo’s at the link.

It looks like former Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist has put on a few pounds but she obviously has no qualms about displaying the photo of her hot bod that have all the uptight assholes so uptight. Her face looks a hell of a lot better too.

The rebuttals from the Global Warming nuts concerning current climate measurements should be quite entertaining.

Over the past year, anecdotal evidence for a cooling planet has exploded. China has its coldest winter in 100 years. Baghdad sees its first snow in all recorded history. North America has the most snowcover in 50 years, with places like Wisconsin the highest since record-keeping began. Record levels of Antarctic sea ice, record cold in Minnesota, Texas, Florida, Mexico, Australia, Iran, Greece, South Africa, Greenland, Argentina, Chile — the list goes on and on.No more than anecdotal evidence, to be sure. But now, that evidence has been supplanted by hard scientific fact. All four major global temperature tracking outlets (Hadley, NASA’s GISS, UAH, RSS) have released updated data. All show that over the past year, global temperatures have dropped precipitously.

Time’s running out on the Global Warming scam. At the very least it will be much more difficult over the next couple of years to advance the global warming “theory” as fact when billions of people are freezing the collective asses off.

Related:

Global Warming no doubt causes Global Cooling

STUDY QUESTIONS EFFECTIVENESS OF ANTI-DEPRESSANTS: I have no doubt that anti-depressants are way over-prescribed. I have also several times in the past stated that the dope given to kids for treating severe kidness is way, way over prescribed.

Related:

• Stop Ritalin Abuse
• Riatalin Kids: A sign of the times
• Moreon the Ritalin Kids
• Congressional Steroid Investigation

UPDATE:

DON’T STOP TAKING YOUR MEDS!!! If you are thinking maybe your anti-depressant medications are snake oil, for gawd’s sake don’t suddenly stop taking them. See your doctor about slowly tapering off the drug or you could could wind up on a shooting rampage or something.

DEMOCRACY PREVAILS IN PAKISTAN: An inter-ministerial committee has proclaimed “The filthy, rotten, YouTube has been banned in Pakistan. The People have spoken. Thank You. That is all.”

The Kidz PC, an ancient Dell L500, caught a bug the other day so instead of fixing it I had the eldest kid pull the plug, literally. I made a deal that if each kid, there are two, put in a hundred bucks I would pay the balance for a brand-spanking new PC. I was figuring about $350 plus a monitor for a decent, Internet folly machine. I paid for the monitor since I was planning to get flat-screens for the remaining computers anyway.

For $459, which includes an $80 mail-in rebate, I got an Acer Aspire M1610 and a 19″ Acer wide-screen monitor with decent specs, and a Lexmark printer that I don’t need and will attempt to give away, if possible. In every way, shape, and form factor this PC is at least 10 times better than the Dell which it replaces. The Kidz are ecstatic, just like Christmas.

The Kidz had the satisfaction of exercising their purchasing power, along with the thrill of dickering with a moronic sales person, and slapping their hard-earned money on the counter when the deal was done. I think they are quite happy and proud with the transaction.

So anyway, I plug in all the bits and pieces and fire up the new Acer, which also came with Windows Vista Premium, and waited… and then waited some more. The machine came with a Gig of RAM but I think everyone who knows anything about Vista knows a Gig is not sufficient breathing room for the bloated operating system.

On the other hand, a Gig of Ram combined with an Intel dual core processor running Windows XP is blazingly fast. And WinXP is quite stable. I don’t need a fancy PC with a fancy operating system for an Internet folly device.

So I reformatted the hard drive, installed WinXP Pro, AVG anti-virus, Firefox, and Ad-aware and that’s my Internet-in-a-cheap box configuration.